Eliaz Tobias's Blog

Revealing Microsoft’s Cloud Services in “The World Summit for Cloud Computing”

3 days ago, Maor David and I had the chance to co-present and speak on Microsoft’s recent announcements for the cloud. The “World Summit of Cloud Computing” as part of IGT took place in Shefaim convention center with 400 people attending. It was published as a global event and therefore it was all conducted in English. From the feedbacks we’ve got, people were very impressed from our roadmap and offerings for Public Cloud Windows Azure Platform, our Private Cloud with Dynamic Data Center Toolkit and services running on the cloud including Business Productivity Online Services (BPOS). I will share the video as soon as I have it. For now, you can download the presentation file from here.

So what were the main messages we focused on?

Cloud Computing is the next generation of computing and it will change the way we develop applications for the next 10 years or more. The ability to outsource parts of the IT possesses many possibilities for saving costs and being up to date. Moreover, we have certain expectations from what we refer to as a cloud application model:

• We expect out of cloud environments to provide scalable and elastic hosting and on-the-fly resource allocation capabilities.
• We expect it to be service oriented and that way we can leverage our services built as part of the current generation of SOA applications and deploy them to the cloud in a phased migration.
• We expect it to be highly available and have a mechanism for supporting staged production and smooth upload of new versions of services.
• We expect our services in the cloud to be self managed by an automatic mechanism.
• We expect the cloud to support multi tenancy which allows services and data sets of different tenants to be separated so a tenant will have access only to his own data and services.
• More things we expect from the cloud is for it to be federated, model based etc.

Software + Services (S+S) is Microsoft’s long year vision to provide customers with the freedom to choose between cloud services and on premise software. The idea is to provide a deployment choice for the developer and IT professional. In addition, the idea is to provide the ability to build hybrid applications which are partly on premise and partly in the cloud since there is no one model that fits all scenarios.

S+S is the foundation of the Microsoft’s Platform moving forward. It now includes two stacks which are connected and built on the same foundations. A stack for the on premise and a stack for the cloud including an operating system for the on premise (Windows Server) and an operating environment as a service in the cloud (Windows Azure). The same goes for a relational database (SQL Server and SQL Azure) and application server and services with the “App Fabric”. On top of these we have the unified programming model of .NET and developer tools of Visual Studio. The idea behind using the same tools for both on premise and cloud is one of the themes Microsoft is committed to. The theme is to leverage developer skills and make it easy for them to develop for the cloud with the same tools they are used from the on premise development. In addition, Microsoft supports Non-Microsoft developers so they can deploy their Java or PHP applications to Windows Azure directly from Eclipse or other tools. On top of this we have the applications layer where our Servers (Exchange, Dynamics, SharePoint etc.) and Services (BPOS) exist. In addition, this is the layer where ISVs can offer their products and services when they build for the Microsoft Platform.

Figure 1 – The Microsoft’s S+S Platform

Windows Azure Platform is the offer Microsoft provides for public cloud. It consists of Windows Azure, SQL Azure and the AppFabric. The public cloud resides in data centers throughout the world: Chicago, San Antonio, Amsterdam, Dublin, Singapore and Hong-Kong. This platform as a service also keeps bridges between the on premise and the cloud with ways to sync data, transfer messages and access services. The entire cloud is monitored with the Azure Fabric Controller which is a highly parallel management system. Additional benefits of Windows Azure Platform are: Scalable and Elastic Hosting Environment, Automated Management, Durable and replicated Storage Service and a Rich developer experience for both MS and Non-MS developers.

Windows Azure and SQL Azure will be available in production on January 2010.

In Israel it will be available on Q2, 2010.

Figure 2 – A container in the Chicago Data Center with 1800-2500 servers

Figure 3 – Keeping bridges between the enterprise and Windows Azure Platform

At this stage, Maor David came up to the stage to demonstrate the Windows Azure Platform. The main ideas he empathized are the developer experience, automated management and bridges between the cloud and the enterprise. He decided to show how we can use Visual Studio 2010 to open a new project for the cloud and how we can test it locally before sending it to a staging environment on Windows Azure. He also showed the Windows Azure Platform Portal where various actions and configurations can take place. At the end, he showed how a Data Sync of Partial data can take place and how the service bus as part of the “App Fabric” can be used to connect to the on premise from the cloud and get sensitive data that we didn’t deploy to the cloud.

Private Clouds are also something we’re looking at. We released the Dynamic Data Center Toolkit for Hosting Companies and we are about to release the Dynamic Data Center Toolkit for Enterprises in H1 2009. The idea is to leverage existing data centers that want to provide more dynamic cloud-like experience for the organization or its customers but without relying on a public cloud. Places like defense organizations or places where regulations prohibit from keeping data out of the country are relevant for this. The private cloud provides a perspective guidance for organizations that want to leverage private clouds.

Figure 4 – Private Cloud for Hosters or Enterprises Slide

BPOS, Business Productivity Online Services is a set of 4 Office Servers provided as online services. The services available include Exchange Online with 5GB Mail service per user that will increase to 25GB by spring 2010. Exchange Online also provides shared calendar, contacts, connectivity with mobile devices and compliant archiving. In addition, BPOS includes SharePoint Online for portal and document management services, Office Live Meeting for virtual meetings and Office Communication Service Online for presence and instant messaging. The offering is available today in Israel and is free of charge until March 2010.

Figure 5 – Business Productivity Online Services (BPOS)

To summarize, the future looks cool and promising with Cloud Computing and Software + Services. We have announced in the event some of the services and their availability and we invite you all to get a token and start developing for Windows Azure.

Published Saturday, December 05, 2009 5:32 PM by eliazt